Fuchs pushed her into the passageway, walking her backwards further into the darkness out of sight of anyone. Clara frantically clawed at his hand, and then in desperation at his face, but her gloved hands just slid from his sweaty skin.
She couldn’t let this happen to her. She refused to let it happen. Yet at the same time, she didn’t know how to stop it. She managed to get her glove off her right hand and then with all the breath and energy she could muster, she kneed him between his legs while at the same time, dragging her fingernails down his face.
He cried out. Keeled over. His grip simultaneously letting go of her throat.
‘Fucking bitch,’ he gasped.
Clara tried to push him out of the way. The passageway was too narrow for her to try to get by easily. She didn’t know where it led, and she wasn’t prepared to take a risk. Running further into a dead end was not an option. She had mere seconds to act.
With another shove, she tried to get past, but Fuchs stood his ground. He grabbed her by the hair and slapped her hard across the face.
Clara swayed. Everything was going black. Her vision blurred. She felt sick.
Then she was aware of being shoved against the wall, the back of her head banging against the brickwork. Another wave of nausea swept over her. Her head was spinning. It was like having too much wine where her senses were dulled and reactions heavy and delayed.
And then she was alert all of a sudden as she felt Fuchs’s spin her around, pinning the side of her face to the wall, his boot kicking first her left foot and then her right foot apart. His hand capturing both her wrists in his. His body pressing her against the wall so she could barely breathe.
She cried out then. ‘NO!’
She tried to spin her body away from him, to move her feet together.
‘Shut up,’ he snarled, his alcohol-soaked breath hot against her face. ‘No one is going to help you. Not even your husband. See how he likes this.’
Clara cried out again as she felt his hand grabbing at her underwear. Tears streamed down her face. Tears of fear. Tears of anger.
Chapter 28
A strange numbness settled over her, as if her body had suddenly become weightless and hollow. The sounds of Fuchs’s heavy breathing, the distant rumble of a late-night tram became muffled and far away as if she were hearing them underwater. There was a sense of being present but disconnected from reality.
The sound of a grunt and a thud, scuffling feet and voices filtered through her mind. The heavy weight on her body lifted. Her arms fell away from the wall, no longer pressed in place above her head.
‘Clara. Clara!’
She could hear her name being called in some sort of urgent whisper. Calling her again and again. A hand on her shoulder as she was turned away from the wall.
‘Clara.’ The voice was insistent.
She opened her eyes. It took a moment to focus, to make out the dark shadow of someone standing in front of her.
‘Clara.’ A gentler tone.
She looked harder and then gasped. ‘Paul? Oh, my God, Paul.’ She clung onto him as her mind raced, trying to process what had happened. And then it all came flooding back with horrifying clarity. Her body began to tremble violently.
‘We need to go,’ Paul was saying. He looked concerned, like he didn’t know what to say or do to help her. ‘You need to go. Now.’
‘What happened?’ she whispered.
Paul looked back over his shoulder to the ground, where the body of Fuchs lay unmoving.
Clara gave another gasp.
‘Do you need a doctor?’ Paul asked. He gave her a gentle shake. ‘Clara, look at me. Do you need a doctor?’
‘A doctor?’ For a moment she didn’t understand the question. She touched her face, grazed from the brickwork, her lip swollen from where Fuchs had struck her. She looked down her body and mentally assessed herself for a few seconds. ‘No,’ she said finally. She looked back at Fuchs. ‘Is he .?.?. ?’
‘Dead?’ Paul nodded.
She looked at the young man in front of her and nodded.Thank you, her mind whispered as she looked at Paul’s young face, his hands trembling a little from what he’d done. But even as overwhelming gratitude flooded through her, her heart broke for this boy who had just crossed a line he could never uncross. He was barely more than a child, not even twenty and now he had to carry this forever.
